April 6, 2016 AT 11:00 am

LED Night Clock

I joined the Reading Hackspace shortly before Christmas and wanted a project that would expose me to some of the tools and expertise I now had access to. Some of the projects that drew my eye were those using Neopixels, and one or two people were doing projects using the ESP8266. I had done some Arduino prototyping before, mainly on breadboard or stripboard, so I wanted to use that knowledge and expand it. I was encouraged to try and create my first PCB as part of the project.

I came up with the idea of creating a neopixel clock, where each neopixel shone into some frosted acrylic, red signifies hours, blue minutes and green seconds. The colours are mixed as they overlap creating a bit of art as well as being able to display the time. If you want to see it in action take a look at the video. The use of acrylic would expose me to some 2D CAD and laser cutting.